Pay Attention to Bitcoin (2024).

PAY ATTENTION TO BITCOIN: The Rise of Digital Gold and its Place in the Evolution of Money (2024), by Joseph Voelbel is a punch bitcoin primer meant to be readable by someone who has never heard of the subject matter and simply wants to know more. Occasional language herein pulls from an emergent glossary surrounding the topic, but will be accompanied with an explanation as to why.

The opening chapter contains the thesis of the book, that money has evolved over time, from seashells to gold to credit cards, and that digital cryptocurrency is the next step in that evolution. The primary thread behind this evolution is that currency – in whatever form – is fueled by attention and that attention en masse acts as a sort of “judge, jury, and executioner” for money’s variegated forms.

• The reader will find amidst its pages the eminent history of gold, the inimitable role of The Federal Reserve and all Central Banks, the origination of bitcoin and the financial soothsayers that envisioned its creation, (e.g., John Nash, Bucky Fuller, H.A. Hayek, and Milton) the meaning of “sound money” and how bitcoin’s characteristics conform to it, as well as rudimentary technical explanations of how bitcoin works and why.

• The most philosophical component of the book is an extrapolation of the meaning of attention, an analysis of the nature of herd mentality and hive minds, as well as the dexterous role bitcoin plays around electricity, its capacity to incentivize electrification and become an energetic unit of account, and its palliative potential when placed up against the pernicious claws of debt hooked into emerging nation states.

The prevailing argument around all subject matter covered is encompassed by a neologic aphorism, which is: “bitcoin fixes this”. A neologism is a new word. Bitcoin is a new word. An aphorism is “a comprehensive principle expressed in a few words”. Fixes this is the aphorism. Bitcoin fixes this. While that may or may not be the case it couldn’t ever be unless we pay attention to bitcoin.

Nineteen Stories (2017).

Nineteen Stories is a collection of shorts exploring the unknown. It was inspired by the dense terse and opaque style of Borges.

Nineteen Stories (Complete Audio Book Edition).